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Silicon Valley’s Chamath Palihapitiya, the tech investor behind the Social Capital venture firm, is telling clients that the start-up economy is has turned into a sophisticated—and dangerous—Ponzi scheme and the high-stakes losers are employees and limited partners. In a letter from Social Capital, Palihapitiya notes that “over the past decade, a subtle and sophisticated game has emerged between VCs, LPs, founders, and employees”, and someone has to foot the bill for it as VCs are “smart enough to transfer the risk”.

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV.

Silicon Valley geeks say it sharpens their thinking and enhances creativity. Other people say it lifts the fog of depression. A novel experiment launching 3 September 2018 will investigate whether microdosing with LSD really does have benefits – or whether it’s all in the mind. Microdosing using psychedelic drugs – either LSD or magic mushrooms – is said to have become very popular, especially with people working in the Californian digital tech world...

Privates Beach is named not for its exclusivity but for its permissive stance on nude sunbathing. This small patch of paradise on the California coastline is adored by locals, and anyone is welcome to enjoy the clean and quiet spot. If, that is, they have a key costing $100 a year. A 9ft iron gate blocks the path to a beach staircase, set among expensive hillside homes in the tony surf town of Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. Yet by California law, all the beaches along its 840 alluring miles of coastline belong to the people...

Another Silicon Valley mogul has come out in favor of universal basic income — and this one is actually putting his money where his mouth is to fund a study to see how it works, which makes his optimism on the subject all the more encouraging. Sam Altman is the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, which has helped fund the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, and Dropbox.

A year ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood before the 19th Communist Party Congress and laid out his ambitious plan for China to become a world leader by 2025 in advanced technologies such as robotics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest private players —the so-called unicorns —have managed to put off public listings thanks to a market awash in private capital. Exhibit A: Uber Technologies, which landed a staggering $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in 2016. Yasir Al Rumayyan, managing director of the fund, is one of a dozen members on Uber’s board of directors.

Last week, news surfaced that Saudi Arabian officials were suspected to have killed US journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly torturing and dismembering him inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Across Washington, officials are now discussing ways to penalize the country for the killing, whether through sanctions or other methods. But that reaction could create unexpected problems for US tech companies, which have received billions in investment from Saudi Arabia in recent years.

I think we can all agree that Silicon Valley needs more adult supervision right about now. Is the solution for its companies to hire a chief ethics officer? While some tech companies like Google have top compliance officers and others turn to legal teams to police themselves, no big tech companies that I know of have yet taken this step. But a lot of them seem to be talking about it, and I’ve discussed the idea with several chief executives recently. Why? Because slowly, then all at once, it feels like too many digital leaders have lost their minds.

The US technology industry formally lined up beside Apple on Thursday in the company’s legal fight with the FBI over encryption. The phalanx of Silicon Valley colleagues and rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Cisco and others filed a joint brief in California’s central district court. A second group of tech firms such as Airbnb, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit and Twitter, filed another.

During the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley, the megalomaniac CEO of the search giant Hooli offers protagonist Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) $10 million for his still-nascent startup, Pied Piper. The initial script called for a much bigger offer, but show creator Mike Judge thought that was over the top. Judge said, "that's too much, no one is going to buy that it's $100 million," Middleditch said at a South By Southwest panel...

Bill Campbell — who garnered the name “The Coach” for the sage advice and counsel he gave numerous tech leaders from Apple’s Steve Jobs to Google’s Larry Page to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — has died. News of his passing popped up on Facebook early this morning and many prominent tech players also confirmed the death to me, which came after a long battle with cancer. It is a big loss for Silicon Valley, given the impact a man who said...

Are we facing another tech bubble? Or, to put it in Silicon Valley speak, are most unicorn startups born zombies? How you answer these questions depends, by and large, on where you stand on the overall health of the global economy. Some, like the prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel, argue that virtually everything else – from publicly traded companies to houses to government bonds – is already overvalued. The options, then, are not many...

"Game of Thrones" wasn't the only show to return to HBO Sunday night. "Silicon Valley" had its season three premiere afterward. If you paid close attention, the show made a lot of subtle changes to its opening animation sequence to reflect the ever-changing look of companies in Silicon Valley. Here's how the show's animation looked during the final episode of season two...

A cache of internal documents shows that despite growing revenue, Palantir has lost top-tier clients, is struggling to stem staff departures, and isn’t collecting most of the money it touts in high-value deals.

Google may soon be hit with a record fine by the European Commission, as it seeks to punish Google and discourage other tech giants from taking advantage of their dominant market position. The Telegraph reports that the commission is currently planning to issue a 3 billion euro fine (about $3.39 billion USD) after finding that Google abused its search monopoly. Its highest fine to date is 1.1 billion euros, in 2009.

Last year, Ellen Pao sued her former employer, venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for allegations of gender-based discrimination. Though she ultimately lost her case, Pao inspired much-needed conversations about Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. Her fight against discrimination in the tech world also blew up at Reddit, where she resigned from her job as the interim C.E.O. after factions of the online community revolted against her decision to shut down subreddits that encouraged harassment.

When the technology investor Peter Thiel takes the stage just before Donald J. Trump at the Republican convention this week, he will become the most prominent public face of a species so endangered it might as well be called extinct: the Silicon Valley Trump supporter. Nobody knows what Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will say (he declined an interview), but in the tech industry, his appearance at the convention is being greeted with more apprehension than excitement. Venture capitalists have a special term for investment opportunities that offer the potential for a...

Once Kate Downing and her husband Steve did the math, it was obvious that if they wanted to raise a family, staying in Palo Alto, California, was not an option. Although Steve, 33, works as a software engineer at a nearby Silicon Valley technology company and Kate, 31, is a product attorney at another tech firm, the cost of owning a home near their jobs has simply become too steep for them. If they wanted to purchase their current house – which they rent with another couple for $6,200 a month total...

On 12 July 1967, Florida newspaper the St Petersburg Times had an eye-catching front-page headline: “Dame Margot, Nureyev seized in hippie raid.” Police had busted a party in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, and unexpectedly ensnared two world-famous gatecrashers: Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who had been in the city all of four hours. “Marijuana cigarettes were found at the scene,” noted the paper, although the two ballet dancers had to be released as there was no evidence that they had been smoking them. A high-spirited Nureyev had, however, performed a jeté into the back of a police van.

Telling my story isn’t going to be easy. Oftentimes I feel embarrassed, enraged, and regretful when I have to relive it, but in the end it is a story and life lesson which should be shared so that others may know major red flags to look out for when choosing to work for a startup or new business. What you are about to read is true and happened within the last four months. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty.

The median income for American millennials is $35,300. That's according to the Federal Reserve's 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted every three years, which also finds a generation—roughly those aged 22 to 35—who are mired in college loans, less invested in the stock market, and far less likely to own a home than previous generations.

Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley? One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, “This is Silicon Valley, right here.”

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people are convinced that we are living in a computer simulation. And now they’re trying to do something about it. At least two of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires are pouring money into efforts to break humans out of the simulation that they believe that it is living in, according to a new report.

It is election day in the United States, and the tech figure who had one of the biggest impacts on the current cycle is perhaps a non-obvious one: Jeff Bezos. Back in 2013 Bezos bought the Washington Post, whose coverage of the campaign has been exemplary. The august newspaper’s reporting, particularly the work of David Fahrenthold, has uncovered stories that have had a far bigger impact than any number of tweets or blog posts or calls for days-off-work in Democrat-safe California ever could have had. What Bezos understood is a technology industry truism...

In October, a Donald Trump supporter stood up at a Santa Monica technology conference and berated billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban for being dismissive of Trump. Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner who built his wealth in online radio streaming in the mid-90s, had said Trump wasn’t a viable option for president. The exchange went on for minutes, but instead of losing his cool, Cuban told the audience that having your views challenged can only make people and companies stronger.